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So you’re a WP Engine customer and can’t figure out why your plugins and themes suddenly won’t update. Well my friends, you’ve missed out on quite the drama. Essentially the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg has not been happy with WP Engine’s use of their trademark and cut them off from receiving updates from the WordPress Foundation. This means you currently can’t update your WordPress, Themes and Plugins.
WP Engine is a great company so surely, they’ll eventually figure out a workaround for these issues but in the meantime, you have a website that’s not getting updates and are opening yourself up to security vulnerabilities. There’s essentially 2 things you can do with your website at the moment.
Do nothing
The first option is that you don’t mind too much and will just wait for things to blow over. Maybe you’ve been satisfied with WP Engine’s service and wanna give them the time, maybe performance doesn’t matter too much to you (If so, why are you on WP Engine though?) so you might as well wait.
We at Name Radiance don’t like that style, if there’s a problem we fix it immediately and set a contingency in place because nobody cares about our problems as much as we do. Especially when it comes to a dispute like this which has no clear end in sight. This brings us to the next option…
Migrate
For most of you, this is an unacceptable risk/problem. You pay the big bucks to have your site run smoothly and reliably without interruption. Though WP Engine isn’t directly at fault, continuing to host with them is putting your business at risk of security vulnerabilities and leaving you behind your competition.
Luckily, WordPress is free & open source software which means you can migrate to another provider at any time without significant changes or downtime. One host works the same way as another outside of pricing, customer support and performance.
We’re obviously writing this guide with the intention of getting some of you to sign up with us but first let’s go through what you’re most likely looking for.
Similar alternatives
If you’re a current WP Engine customer, you’re used to a managed host even if you don’t know what that means.
So what are your options?
Pressable
Pressable is a managed WordPress host that’s owned and operated by Automattic inc, WordPress’ parent company. They know how WordPress works inside and out so it’s no surprise that their managed hosting services are top tier.
The pricing style is exactly as you expect coming from WP Engine, only difference is they’re much cheaper. and have a suite of complimentary add-ons such as Jetpack security since Automattic also develops that plugin.
Though we make no money recommending Pressable however, Name Radiance only exists because Automattic made WordPress free to use so it’s only fair we promote them back.
Kinsta
WP Engine’s main competitor in the same style is Kinsta. They do everything WP Engine does at a slightly lower price and they’re hosted with GCP as opposed to AWS. (Google Servers instead of Amazon servers)
Most modern promo when it comes to managed hosting will be recommending Kinsta nowadays in the same way they used to recommend WP Engine.
WPX
WPX is the new kid on the block but they offer the most competitive pricing packages and have excellent performance. They did however experience a bit of a drop in performance during the early days of COVID lockdowns (understandable) which indicates that their total server capacity was close to the client usage. This means they’re not leasing a lot of unused server resources as headroom so you might see performance drop if there’s a big event involving them or their clients.
That said, they did fix the performance issues at the time so you can trust that they’ll fix it when it comes up and they offer better pricing than the previous two at high volumes.
Better options to consider
Guess what? We’re about to promote our own products. That’s right! We believe our product is awesome and you should go with us.
Name Radiance’s hosting technically sits at the level between managed VPS and managed dedicated servers as we’ve grown in clients over the years and began to offer multiple datacenter locations to help you better serve clients.
Self-hosted VPS
If you’re tech-savvy, self-hosting your own VPS is an excellent way to
In this space, Digitalocean, Linode and Vultr are the big, reliable players. We like Vultr and use their services among others because they were the first to offer high frequency servers and make a big effort to offer a good variety of datacenter locations.
Do keep in mind however, that you’d be responsible for keeping your server secure and manage all your backups yourself. If you’re comfortable with that, then it’s the perfect price/performance option. If not, this is wasted time and headaches.
Managed VPS
If you’re not gonna bother setting up and managing your own VPS, you can now
The #1 player in this space is Cloudways. Name Radiance started off hosting clients on Cloudways before we got good at managing servers ourselves. Cloudways used to be independent but they’ve since been acquired by DigitalOcean, Nothing wrong with that, they didn’t lower the quality of their service.
If you go with this option,
Dedicated server or server cluster
If you’re at the level where your site is handling well over 2 million visitors a month, it’s time to look into dedicated servers or even multiple dedicated servers. This does depend on your setup and where in the world your traffic is coming from. At this level, you should have a good idea of which provider you’re comfortable working with already.
In case you don’t, we offer this service also. Prices start at $100 a month but depend on your requirements of course, so it’s not a number we can give without knowing your situation.
Options to avoid
Not every alternative is a good alternative as you might imagine. It would be too long to name all the bad alternatives so let’s just go through the main ones.
Flywheel
Flywheel was and is a great managed web host. They were WP Engine’s competitor running on GCP as opposed to WP Engine’s AWS servers. The only issue is, Flywheel has since been acquired by WP Engine, which puts them in the exact same risk category as WP Engine and not worth switching over if you’re already with the parent company.
Any shared host
There’s nothing wrong with shared hosts, in fact they’re an incredible if you’re on a budget and want to get something up and running. The only issue is that your site’s performance will be subpar. How many seconds per page are you willing to wait when you’re browsing to buy something? How many pages do you normally browse through before making a purchase?
Shared hosting is great for hobby sites and preliminary projects, not serious businesses.
In this category, Epik, Namecheap and Hostinger are the main players for value. You won’t likely go wrong with the others, those just happen to be good providers we’ve had experience with in the past for our own test sites.
Closing points
For what it’s worth, you didn’t do anything wrong selecting WP Engine as a host at the time. The current legal battle and petty tactics are being employed. Petty tactics that end up affecting you the customer.
This problem might end in 3 days, or it could keep going indefinitely. Both sides are highly motivated to have things end in their favor and have millions of dollars in resources to draw this out. Can you afford to wait? Should you even be expected to sit and wait as a paying customer?